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The familiar challenge:
We are 6 weeks into summer, and in the pile on our desk about mid-way down is that proposal, paper, course redesign that there has yet to be time for.

Each week offers 40+ hours, yet there can barely be 2 hours of continuous focused worktime strung together. How can this be?

What’s going on:
We have time but how we use it changes the quality of that time for worse or for better. Just as fractures weaken the structure integrity of a beam, or aesthetics transform an object into art, time’s productivity is transformed by our use.

Within computer science and programming there is a distinction between maker time and manager (meeting) time. The first involves chunks of time where one can focus on conceptualizing and working through the depth of a design without surfacing to respond or shift to other topics. Managerial time, conversely, is broken up and additive. One more meeting in a day full of meetings does not have the same cost as a meeting in the middle of block of maker time.

Photo credit – Mark Hunter, CC-By

At a recent SoTL writing retreat, a faculty member commented how it was the first time they had read a full article uninterrupted. It can even take a few hours to settle into comfortable realization that the knock will not come, and the email (turned off) will not ding. By then also having become reacquainted with the project, work starts to build and more is accomplished in a day or two than in weeks past.

This call to create space in our week (or at least in our summer) for focused work is the drumbeat of Cal Newport’s 2016 book Deep Work: Rules for Success in a Distracted World. He posits that creating space and scheduling for deep intellectual work is the act of taking a chunk of time and maximizing productively. In a recent podcast, he speaks of both what is gained and how focus gets weakened by quick novel stimuli like emails, online, social media etc. It is a shift from talking and thinking about a project to conceptualizing and creating.

So what can I do now?
The GMCTL has 4 Deep Work time opportunities that provide focused time to work with expertise and facilitation as you need it.

SoTL Writing Retreats (July 20, 21 & 22) with uninterrupted time and on-hand consultations for faculty, instructors or staff working toward publishing on a teaching and learning research project. Select a morning or come for 3 days or any combination in between. Register, we will confirm your choice of days and times via email.

Time for Course Design & Prep – In addition to the course design institute offered each year, we offer Drop-in mornings or afternoons. July 26 9:30am – 12:00pm is the next Consultations & Coffee Drop-In Morning. Bring what you have so far including any questions and ideas, and stay for time to work. *Registration is not required.

Book “Deep Work” space for you, your course team or SoTL project colleagues to meet. We can arrange for a space and customize the level of facilitation and support you want from a few minutes to more. Contact GMCTL.

Get unstuck – book a consultation to think through a course idea/challenge, a research design for a SoTL project, or an upcoming term. Contact GMCTL.

Overtime, identify what works for you. Each person’s approach to Deep Work, like preferences in morning beverages, are unique, though with shared key ingredients and conditions to percolate or steep.

In this blog, I pull together several of the concepts discussed in previous posts, such as Portals and WikiProjects, and consider how you can begin to develop course materials and assignments for a Wikipedia-based course.

Let’s say, for example, that you are teaching a physics course and want to assign students the job of editing or writing physics-related articles. A good place to start, for both student and instructor, is the Physics portal, which briefly reviews the field and links to the main article on Physics (see excerpt below).

It also has a tab entitled “Topics, Categories, Textbook, and Featured articles,” which links to Wikipedia articles on classical physics, modern physics and cross-disciplinary topics, as well as a “textbook” that slots Wikipedia physics articles under chapter headings. While the textbook remains a work in progress, it is a more efficient way to gauge Wikipedia’s coverage (or lack thereof) than simply using the Wikipedia search engine. Apart from the main Physics portal, other relevant portals might include Astronomy, Cosmology, Electromagnetism, Gravitation, and Science.

The third tab on the Physics portal page is “WikiProjects and things to do,” which I turn to next.

WikiProjects

The Physics portal lists four WikiProjects and task groups: WikiProject Physics, WikiProject Space, WikiProject Time, and WikiProject Cosmology. WikiProjects are valuable both to the quality of Wikipedia and to instructors; for an explanation, see my two-part blog, “WikiProjects, Article Importance, and Article Quality: An Intimate Relation­ship” (http://bit.ly/2l8fSEa and http://bit.ly/2lH9hjJ).

One of the key things that a Wiki­Project does is rank Wikipedia articles for importance and quality on a two-dimensional grid. For example, shown here is the grid from WikiProject Physics (screen shot of 27 May 2017, linked to the current version). I’ve selected 822, which is the number of stub-class articles of mid-importance to WikiProject Physics, a list of which can be accessed by clicking on the number.[1] Stub-class articles can be a good starting point for student projects, though start-class articles are also good. An example of a start-class article that is also considered to be of top importance (of the seven in this category) is Classical physics.

It is a good idea for students to become familiar with the different categories of importance and quality in Wikipedia articles, so they know what to strive for and how things can be improved. For example, it would be instructive for them to review at least a couple of the project’s 61 Featured articles,[2] one of the six List articles,[3] a few of the 144 Good articles,[4] and a smattering of the remaining categories. Reading the Talk pages associated with these articles and looking at their View History pages is also a good introduction to the kinds of issues that student editors might face. See, for example, the “Classical physics” Talk page.

One of the things an instructor should consider doing is creating a list of articles that need work and that are within the scope of knowledge for a particular course. Students choose an article to edit from this list, and may also be assigned the task of peer-reviewing another student’s edits to that student’s chosen article. Both the editing and the peer reviewing can be graded. The aim should be to take assigned pages to Good article status, or as close as possible. (Students can make significant contributions to articles, even if, for example, they only start within C-class status, which is not the same as a “C” grade on the U of S grading guidelines.) Here are some Wikipedia articles that might be candidates for editing in a basic Physics course, arrayed in a table that also shows their importance and current quality assessments within WikiProject Physics, along with assignments to a hypothetical set of 15 student editors and peer reviewers:

Instructors should also take a close look at the Wikipedia Education Program, set up through the Wiki Ed Foundation to support instructors and students. Help ranges from accessing brochures to training to designing and implementing a 12-week course with Wiki Ed support and an instructor dashboard. The dashboard is a powerful resource that lets you see what aspects of the training that students have completed, as well as all articles or other projects they are working on. You can get started at the main page for educators and proceed to various pages, such as the one that provides case studies of assignments and grading.

Let’s consider an example of a Wiki Ed course, this time from the life sciences. The course is “Molecular Genetics” and the main course page shows that it was taught this spring by Eric Guisbert of the Florida Institute of Technology, with assistance from Wiki Ed’s Ian Ramjohn. Clicking on the Dashboard link takes you to the details for the course; the header excerpt, linked to the Dashboard, is shown below.

This header, and further information found by clicking on its links (Timeline, Students, Articles, etc.) show that of the 27 students who registered for the Wikipedia option, 23 completed the training, and that this cohort edited 55 articles and created three new ones—about 1100 edits comprising some 31,400 words. The articles were viewed by Wikipedia users about 1.7 million times during the course, which provides a sense of the real-world impact—positive or negative—that student editors can have.

Let’s look at the work of one student with username Ncameron2013 (accessed via the “Students” link). Ncameron2013 was assigned (or chose) the article “Receptor Tyrosine Kinase” to edit and was also assigned (or chose) three other articles for peer review—that is, the student was tasked with reviewing and commenting on the work of the three student editors for those articles.[6]

We can find out what Ncameron2013 did by clicking on the dropdown arrow on the right. The resulting screen shows that after completing the training modules and preliminary assignments,[7] Ncameron2013 was active, first in the Sandbox, commenting on the work of LBates2008 and Cbyrd2011 and creating a new section of the article entitled “Regulation” (March 12–15); then working on the article live from March 15–16. (See below.) Clicking on the “Show” button for any of these entries allows us to see the work that Ncameron2013 did on these occasions. This feature is helpful in giving an instructor a precise understanding of a student’s contribution to article development; it is especially useful in the event that another Wikipedian edits or deletes the student’s work (as has happened more than once with my students).

In the case of Ncameron2013, the most extensive edit was the 8148-character addition on March 15 at 3:29 pm adding two new sections to the article—“Regulation” and “Drug Therapy”—as well as subsections, body text, references, and a table. (See the excerpt from the “Show” screen below; It shows the first two sentences and the relevant citations in Wikitext format.)

Ncameron2234 continued to modify this addition to the article over the next 24 hours before wrapping up on March 16 at 3:20 pm. You can see the net effect of Ncameron2013’s edits by using the “diff” feature in the View history tab for the article:

This generates a page that shows the differences between the version of the article before Ncameron2013 started working on it (version saved by Headbomb on 2 March 2017 at 5:30) and the by the time Ncameron2013 finished working on it, ignoring any edits in between (version saved by Ncameron2013 on 16 March 2017 at 21:20).[8] The current version of the article (with subsequent edits by others) can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_tyrosine_kinase. A screen shot from that version, reflecting Ncameron2103’s additions, is shown below:

Finally, the citations that Ncameron2013 added to support these edits are shown below:

I hope that these blog posts have provided greater insight on how you can use Wikipedia assignments to help your students make the leap from consuming knowledge to creating it. From here, my recommendation is to “just do it” and learn how to adapt all of this to your own context. And if you’re excited about getting more involved, consider attending the annual international Wikimania conference, being held this summer in Montreal. Conference themes include the contributions of academic and cultural institutions within the Wikipedia movement, privacy and rights, and the role of technology in disseminating free knowledge. As for me, this will be my last blog post in this series before I take up my new position next month. I thank the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning for giving me this forum to share my thoughts, and invite you to stay in touch with your stories about the use of Wikipedia in higher education.

In the first part of this two-part piece, I discussed arborescent (vertical, discrete, hierarchical) and rhizomatic (horizontal, overlapping, interconnected) ways of acquiring and classifying knowledge, as well as the convergence of the arbor and the rhizome in modern knowledge systems. In this part, I discuss how this applies to Wikipedia.

Most of us use the Web rhizomatically: we enter a search term in Google or Wikipedia, look at the search results, and follow the links, whether to other Wikipedia pages or other online or offline resources. As I said in the previous post, this lets us explore pathways that interest us most, and may also lead to more engaged learning. But this approach can be both over-inclusive, requiring us to sift through a lot of information before getting to what we need the most, and under-inclusive, in that we can miss relevant material that requires different search terms than the ones we used for searching. Fortunately, Wikipedia provides a number of ways for accessing knowledge that makes it a more powerful encyclopedia than it would be if you had to rely on the search engine alone.

The first of these is Portals, which in turn direct you to Categories. A teaser is found on Wikipedia’s home page, which has links to eight named portals as well as a link to all of them (see linked screen shot below).

There are currently 1491 portals on English Wikipedia, with one of these portals being an alphabetical index to all 5.4 million Wikipedia articles from Aa (you might be surprised to know how many rivers are named “Aa”) to ZZ (a scale used in model railroading). When it comes to categories, there is also an alphabetical index to all categories, though given the many thousands of categories, it may be more useful to access the topical category index, which organizes categories under 12 broad headings and provides a separate search engine just for categories (see linked screen shot below).

I tested this by searching for a highly topical subject—cybercrime. The results show that this is a named category (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cybercrime, the standard syntax for categories in Wikipedia). The results list a number of other related categories, such as Cyberwarfare and Cybercrime by country, several of which may be relevant to writing or editing a Wikipedia article. The Cybercrime category in turn currently has 20 subcategories and 123 pages, and the subcategories also have subcategories and pages of their own. Using this approach, I quickly found, for example, the recently created article on the WannaCry cyberattack, reported to have affected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries in May 2017.

The above approach proceeds from the general to the particular in a branching or arborescent fashion (though I could have started at an even higher level of generality—Crime by type). The point I want to make, though, is that you can also discover this structure by going from the particular to the general. For example, if I use Wikipedia’s basic search engine and type in “WannaCry,” I get the article on the WannaCry cyberattack; then, scrolling to the bottom of the article, I find lots of related information, including links to six portals; a template for the category Hacking in the 2010s, showing a timeline with major incidents, groups and vulnerabilities; and links to several other related categories, from “2017 in computer science” to “Ransomware.” From here, I can switch modes and proceed rhizomatically to other topics, while still being able to see the overall structures within which they are organized. In other words, Wikipedia lends itself to a high degree of convergence of both arbor and rhizome.

While the LCC system has been criticized as being more a guide to the books in a library’s collection than a classification of the world’s knowledge, it is well developed and in use by many academic and research libraries. Its 21 classes are further subdivided into a large number of two- or three-letter subclasses that are listed on the LCC page, with, in many cases, links to their own pages. For example, subclass AE – Encyclopedias, mentioned in my last post, has its own Wikipedia entry. Many of these are important subject articles in their own right. For example, RB – Pathology, a subclass of class R – Medicine, links to the Wikipedia article on Pathology, considered of high importance to WikiProject Medicine and currently rated B-class on the project’s quality scale. (On these rating systems, see my blog posts from February 14 and February 28.) Thus for a researcher already familiar with the LCC system (or a component of it such as, in my case, subclass K – Law), Wikipedia offers a way to translate that familiarity and move easily from browsing a library shelf to browsing an online encyclopedia.

In my next post, I’ll bring together a number of concepts that I’ve been writing about. Specifically, I’ll tell you how you can work with Portals, WikiProjects, and the Wiki Ed program to create a course that incorporates Wikipedia assignments and that uses the Wiki Ed dashboard to keep track of student work.

In an ongoing effort to sustain and build the BC Open Textbook Collection, BCcampus asks for your help to identify subject areas within this collection that are missing open textbooks either entirely or in specific categories and/or course levels. As an overview, there are currently 180 textbooks in this collection covering eight main subject areas (Sciences, Trades, Business and Management, Liberal Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Upgrading Programs, Health Related, and Recreation, Tourism, Hospitality and Service). Within these eight areas are 36 secondary subject areas. For a summary of these subject areas and links to specific books, go to the Open Textbook Stats page and click on the “Subjects” tab.

We ask that you please send us suggestions for subject areas that are missing open textbooks, those subject areas where you have heard from faculty “I would adopt an open textbook, but there isn’t one in my subject area”. Additionally, it would be helpful to have the following information for each identified subject area.

We will be reviewing these suggestions as we publish a new call for proposals in the coming months- proposals for creation, adaptation, adoption of open textbooks- preferably with a targeted approach based on the needs of the system.

You may also contact me at heather.ross@usask.ca if you’re an instructor at the U of S with questions or would like assistance finding and integrating open educational resources appropriate for your course.

In my previous post, I characterized the subject categories in the Requested articles page as idiosyncratic and mused that they might be better based on the Library of Congress Classification system. As it happens, Wikipedia does map some of its articles (pages) into the LCC system, and also provides several other methods of organizing knowledge. Some of these are well known, some less so. I want to discuss them because I think that instructors and students alike should be familiar with ways of finding knowledge beyond today’s default method of keyword searching. First, though, I want to talk about two approaches to knowing or learning, which philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari termed arborescent and rhizomatic in their 1980 book, A Thousand Plateaus. I will then consider how these approaches are converging in web-based retrieval systems, including Wikipedia.

The Arbor and the Rhizome

The word arborescent is Latinate for treelike. Tree diagrams, also called dendograms (Greek: dendro, tree + gramma, drawing) have depicted genealogical relationships (“family trees”) since medieval times; the “tree of life” or variants on it have been used at least since Carl Linnaeus classified relationships among organisms; and the ubiquitous “org chart” is a kind of inverted tree. Arborescent ways of knowing are said to emphasize totalizing principles (the notion that universal facts can be discovered and classified), binary opposition (e.g., male-female; predator-prey), and relationships characterized by discrete branching hierarchies rather than horizontal interconnections.

The rhizome is also a botanical metaphor. A rhizome (Greek: “mass of roots”) is a stemlike root lying on or just below the soil surface and having the ability to send roots and shoots from its nodes. Think of ginger, ginseng, and many grasses. The concept allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points, with one thing potentially networked with many other things, sometimes in unpredictable ways. Ecosystems, power grids, and Web 2.0 are quintessentially rhizomatic systems. And Wikipedia is a quintessentially a Web 2.0 phenomenon, in allowing users to collaboratively create knowledge with multiple jumping-in and jumping-off points based on hyperlinked text and images.

Having identified the differences, I don’t want to convey the impression that rhizomatic ways of knowing are either entirely new or necessarily superior to arborescent ways.

As to newness, consider the dictionary, which, even before the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnston’s opus, came to be organized alphabetically rather than topically. This form of organization, which must at first have seemed arbitrary compared to its forebears, turns out to be surprisingly rhizomatic: I can open a dictionary at any page, read a word’s definition, and be led to another word and its definition through an italicized or bolded word in the definition. The idea is so powerful that it stuck: with today’s dictionary apps, you jump to the new word by clicking on it instead of turning pages. Consider also the polymath—a distinctly rhizomatous type of scholar. An early example was Aristotle, whose knowledge spanned physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, ethics, and biology. In a similar vein, Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, musician, mystic and medical writer. Leonardo da Vinci not only created the world’s most famous painting but is also credited with inventing the parachute, helicopter and tank. Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet and propounder of the evolutionary theory more rigorously developed by his grandson, penned a 4,400-line treatise that straddled all branches of science and technology and used a whimsical rhyming couplet structure footnoted with his scientific observations. Though polymaths are at risk of becoming an endangered species, recent interest in interdisciplinary studies may yet save them and their rhizomatic tendencies.

As to superiority, rhizomatic approaches let people access material in ways that are most intuitive for them and explore the links and pathways that interest them most. But while this can lead to more engaged learning, it can also be inefficient and leave knowledge gaps that more structured approaches would avoid. In other words, it can be both over- and under-inclusive.

I’ll illustrate this with an example from my own discipline, law—specifically, the “implied undertaking” rule in litigation.[1] Litigating parties have “discovery rights,” an aspect of which is that they can get copies of each other’s documents that are relevant to the litigation. In Canada, such rights are generally accompanied by an implied undertaking not to use the documents for a purpose outside the litigation (also framed as “collateral or ulterior” to the litigation). Suppose, for example, a dismissed employee sues her employer, a company, for wrongful dismissal. Through the discovery process, she obtains a report that one of the company’s officials made to a government ministry, with comments that criticize the former employee’s ethical conduct. She then starts a new lawsuit against the company official for defamation. If the lawsuit is based solely on the report obtained in the wrongful dismissal action, it will likely constitute a breach of the implied undertaking rule and be unsuccessful.[2] I say “likely” because the rule’s scope is subject to interpretation, may be overlaid with other court rules specific to a particular province, and may be subject to exceptions or court procedures in which a party can seek to be relieved of the undertaking.

Suppose I want to learn more about the rule. One way is to enter “implied undertaking” into a search tool like CanLII’s public-domain search engine or Westlaw’s proprietary product (available free with a U of S library account). This approach generates useful information—in the form of hundreds of case reports decided by judges. On skimming the cases, it becomes apparent that they are weighted according to relevance, which, in a mechanistic attempt at modelling human reasoning, means that they are ordered by the number of times the term “implied undertaking” comes up. This is neither a reliable nor an efficient way to learn about the scope of the rule or its exceptions, and even if I apply filters (for example, isolating the search to cases only in a certain province, or only at appeal-level courts), I am still likely to have to sort through dozens—perhaps hundreds—of cases. Even then, I will likely miss a lot of material because other terms are also used to refer to the concept, such as “deemed undertaking” or “undertaking as to confidentiality.” Isn’t there a better way to get an overview of the subject? Yes, and it’s arborescent.

That way is an encyclopedia article, in this case, from the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest (CED), another Westlaw product. One of the ways of accessing its material is through an alphabetically ordered, branching, hyperlinked table of contents. This requires some thinking about how the subject matter might be organized. After a bit of trial and error, the title “Discovery” seems an option. It has two headings, one for Ontario and one for the Western provinces. Scanning through the topics under either of these headings leads to the subheading for the article on the rule, as can be seen below (omitted subjects marked with an ellipsis).

Clicking on the subheading pulls up an 11-paragraph article that succinctly outlines the rule and how it works, footnoted with a couple of dozen cases for those who want to drill down to get more information. This still leaves me with a fair bit of reading to do, but not nearly as much as by following the purely rhizomatic approach.

Systems Convergence

In fact, the story I have just told is oversimplified, because it doesn’t explain how in modern knowledge systems, rhizomatic and arborescent approaches are evolving towards convergence. For example, the “Implied or Deemed Undertaking” article in the CED also has a paragraph that links to headings in the Canadian Abridgment Digests, which cover cases on the rule from across Canada in digest (condensed) form. Further, even if I had only used my simple keyword search, “implied undertaking,” I could have arrived at the digest list through the first case on my search results by clicking on a sidebar headed “Related Resources.”[3] Unfortunately, this list does not link back to the CED article on the topic, indicating that convergence is still a work in progress. But armed with the new information of a subject entitled “implied or deemed undertaking,” I can use that as a phrase in the CED search engine to find the encyclopedic article of the same name.

Other systems work in similar ways, with varying degrees of convergence. An example of a highly convergent system—one that allows for multiple searching approaches that are cross-linked to each other—is the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Its main web page allows you to choose from three searching methods: Browse, Advanced Search, and Keyword Search. Let’s suppose I want to look for books about collaboration in Wikipedia. I might start with something as simple as a Browse for subjects containing “Wikipedia” (see below).

This takes me to a page that lets me select from several subjects, including one just called “Wikipedia” with 24 records. In that list, I find two titles that seem to relate to my topic: Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia and Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration. I click on them to see their records:

Those titles may be enough to satisfy me, but I won’t have done a very thorough job of researching if I don’t also look at the information below the book title. The first thing I notice is that two books have different Library of Congress (LC) classification numbers.

The first starts with AE100. LC Class A is “General Works,” and subclass AE is “Encyclopedias.” The second starts with ZA4482. LC Class Z is “Bibliography, Library Science” and subclass ZA is Information resources/materials. Thus similar-sounding material may be indexed under different numbers—in the one case, the focus is more on encyclopedias and in the other more on user-generated knowledge—but the LC system allows me to search on both those numbers to expand the search pie. I can do that simply by clicking on the number beside “LC classification (partial)” or by searching for it as a call number in the Browse feature (see below).

If I do that, about 15 records come up for AE100 (followed by higher-numbered records; as the name implies, this feature is similar to browsing books on a shelf). If I do the same thing for ZA4482, about 20 records come up. I have now expanded my search results from 24 to 35 potentially relevant records.

If searching by call number seems too geeky to you, a different option presents itself in the form of related subject headings. There are six of these for the Good Faith book and five for the Global Wikipedia book, with an overlap in the first subject heading, “Wikipedia.” All of these are hyperlinked and take me to the subject listings in the LC catalog. For instance, if I click on the subject heading “Authorship–Collaboration–Case studies” under the record for the Good Faith book, I get three further entries, including one German book that falls in the ZA4482 class and a book on textual curation that falls in the AE1 class.

In my next post, I will show how Wikipedia uses the LCC system as well as several other organizational systems that allow for the convergence of both arborescent and rhizomatic ways of knowing.

[3] My first search result was Jutte v Jutte, 2007 ABQB 191, reflecting the large number of times the term “implied undertaking” appeared in the case. Under “Related Resources” is the hyperlinked heading “Abridgment digests and classifications for all levels of this case.” Clicking on that leads to the following branch of the Canadian Abridgment Digests (the numbers of cases digested for each heading are shown in parentheses):

Sometimes, that example from a peer is just what is needed to help us move from thinking about it to doing it!

As part of GMCTL Celebration Week, check out a wide range of teaching and learning projects undertaken with assistance of funds administered through the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning since 2012. Four showcases, each organized around a theme and set up as a series of faculty panel presentations, are offered:

Come out to learn about how projects were conceived, the ways funds and other supports were used, and lessons learned and impacts on student learning and faculty teaching. Hearing how others found the time and the funds for implementing their new ideas may help spur your own thinking or get you over the hump to pursue that project you’ve had in mind for awhile.

Faculty from across campus who were successful in securing funding of several kinds administered through the GMCTL have volunteered to describe their initiatives. You will leave the showcases with new campus connections and ideas for your teaching. See the list of presenters and register via our GMCTL Celebration Week site.

Funding?

During IP3, the Provost’s Committee for Integrated Planning charged the Vice Provost Teaching and Learning to administer funds in support of Experiential Learning initiatives and Curriculum Innovation, and later government funds to support Open Textbooks were added. Funding processes and assistance have been administered through the GMCTL. For more information click on any of these links or e-mail gmctl@usask.ca or call us. We can provide direct assistance planning projects, writing applications, and accessing a wide variety of campus supports for projects.

In my previous two posts, I discussed how instructors and students can use WikiProjects to select articles for editing in Wikipedia-based course assignments. In this post, I discuss the creation of new articles, using WikiProject Requested articles (WP:WPRA) as a starting point. This is not the only way to start creating new articles, but the process allows you to see whether the article you are thinking of writing, or one like it, has already been requested, and to see how that request fits in with the larger subject of which it is a part.

What is “WikiProject Requested articles”?

The WPRA page explains that WikiProject Requested articles is one of Wikipedia’s oldest projects, and “offers individuals the ability to suggest articles that should be created but which they do not wish to write themselves.” This is usually done by creating red links. These links, unlike the blue links that allow you to jump to other Wikipedia pages, indicate that the linked pages don’t exist‍—but that the linkers wish they did. This is another example of crowdsourcing philosophy at work, and may at first seem like a recipe for chaos or clutter. In fact, it has been one of the main drivers for Wikipedia’s growth. I adverted to this in a previous post, where I wrote about a project that aims to turn redlinked articles on women into bluelinked ones, and in a field in which Wikipedia is greatly underrepresented.

What is the “Requested articles” page?

One of the WikiProject’s outputs is the Requested articles page (WP:REQ). Near the top of it, you’ll see a couple of things of interest. First, there is a table of contents that puts article requests into 14 categories (see sidebar). These categories are idiosyncratic and are open to criticism; one could argue, for example, that categories based on the Library of Congress Classification system would be more helpful. For better or worse, though, this is the system adopted for article requests, so it helps to get to know it. Second, there is an Article creation infobox with links to various Wikipedia processes, policies and tools to help in the creation process once you’ve settled on the article you want to create.

How do I find out whether an article I want to create has already been requested?

Let’s say you’re in Dentistry and thinking of creating an article on alveoloplasty, which also goes by the shorter term alveoplasty. Wiktionary, a Wikipedia companion project, defines this as the “surgical modification of the alveolar ridges in preparation for the fitting of dentures.” On searching for this term in Wikipedia, though, you find there is no article on it. However, your search yields three pages that contain the longer version of the term, all of which show it in red.[1] A little more searching also reveals two stub articles that might be related to the proposed article: Alveolar ridge and Dental alveolus. You also decide to look for “Dentistry” in the Requested articles page. At this point, you might get stymied because it is not immediately obvious where it falls. But with a bit of imagination, it is not hard to find: Dentistry is on the page for Requested articles in Medicine, which in turn is a sub-category of Requested articles for Applied arts and sciences, one of the 14 top-level headings mentioned above. The page syntax follows a common format for article requests:

This section sets out several redlinked articles, including three relating to alveoloplasty: interradicular alveoloplasty, radical alveoloplasty, and simple alveoloplasty. But you decide, wisely, that it would make little sense to have three articles on these procedures when there isn’t even a general article on alveoloplasty. The appropriate strategy, it seems, is to create an article entitled “Alveoloplasty” (which would include a redirect from “Alveoplasty” so that those searching for the shorter term would end up on the right page) and which might use the redlinked article nomenclature (simple, radical, interradicular) in headings for some of the sections within the main article. The article that you create might also link to the articles on Alveolar ridge and Dental alveolus; this is good practice, as such interlinking binds the various pages of Wikipedia into an interconnected whole and might lead to edits on those pages as well.

Of course, you can go straight to the subject headings in “Requested articles” and simply browse, as in a library. This can yield plenty of ideas. For example, the Psychology subheading (under Social sciences) has a long list of redlinked articles, organized alphabetically and annotated. Interspersed among these are blue links, indicating that someone has created an article on that topic or redirected it to another article or article section dealing with the topic. When that happens, the previous red link turns blue. See, for example, “hedonic psychology,” formerly redlinked but now showing in the list as bluelinked and which, on clicking, redirects to Happiness economics; and “externalizing disorder,” which redirects to a section within Emotional and behavorial disorders. Perhaps music, rather than psychology, is your thing. If so, you can find requested articles for jazz performers and venues, classical compositions, instruments, and music organizations, to name just a few topics. If you’re mathematically inclined, the Mathematics heading has 57 categories of requested article categories, ranging from Abstract algebra to Topology (mathematics is one of the most under-developed areas within Wikipedia). And for the list-oriented, there is even a page of requested List articles, ranging from Fictional desert planets to Regional Differences in Medical Terminology. In short, there is something for just about everyone here, and the response to “I don’t know what to write about” may well be: “Go to Requested articles!”

For more than a decade, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) has offered the Course Design Institute (CDI). Throughout the CDI, facilitators from the GMCTL work with instructors on developing or redeveloping a course. We go through learning about your students, writing learning outcomes, choosing teaching strategies, developing assessments, and putting it all together through constructive alignment and the blueprinting of your course.

While the CDI had been an intensive four full-day experience within one week, a few years ago we revamped it to offer it in a “flipped” mode, with participants meeting face-to-face three half days over three weeks, plus completing activities and posting to the discussion forums to provide feedback to each other in BBLearn (our learning management system). This year, we’re taking that approach and modifying it again.

On day one, Tuesday May 2, we’ll meet with participants for a half day to cover knowing your students and writing learning outcomes.

On day two, Thursday May 4, participants will choose one of three options for a day-long elective. Participants may choose from indigenization, open pedagogy, or sustainability. Lunch is included on this day.

On day three, Tuesday May 9, also a half day session, we will talk briefly about the participants’ respective experiences in their day-long elective sessions, review their learning outcomes, and talk about assessment and rubrics.

On day four, Thursday May 11, again a half day session, we will discuss constructive alignment, instructional strategies, blueprinting your course, and course syllabi.

In between the sessions, participants will need to complete activities related to what has been covered or prepare for what will be covered in the next session. Following the CDI, participants will need to complete a brief reflective paper and, once they have begun blueprinting their course, meet with one of the facilitators for a one-on-one consultation.

In this second part of this two-part article, I discuss how WikiProjects, article importance and article quality come together in Wikipedia—and how that conjuncture can help instructors and students with selecting appropriate articles for editing in Wikipedia-based course assignments.

Understanding the Article Assessment Grid

A key WikiProject output is assessment of an article’s quality and importance (see the previous post on the criteria for measuring these). Quality and importance can be plotted on a two-dimensional grid in which each cell represents a particular quality grade and a particular importance level. The cells can then be populated with the number of articles in each of these pairings, using the quality and importance data from the article Talk pages. In Wikipedia, this information is collected—and the cells are populated—with help from a bot (more on which later), allowing for the number of articles of interest to a WikiProject, and their importance and quality, to be updated over time.

The output can be seen by looking at the assessment grid for WikiProject Adoption, fostering, orphan care and displacement (“AFOD”), discussed in the last post. I’ve captured an image of the grid as of 26 February 2017 and hyperlinked it to the actual grid on the AFOD project page, which lets you view the most up-to-date version of the grid.

For now, let’s ignore the bottom part of the grid and focus on the vertical quality axis, starting with “List.” Scanning this line, we see that there are two list-class articles, both of them considered “High” importance. Indeed, these are the only List-class articles for AFOD, as reflected in the “Total” column at far-right, which also shows “2.” Moving up to “Stub,” we can see there are three stub-class articles of high importance, 13 of mid-importance, 31 of low importance, and two that need assessing (“???”), for a total of 49 stub-class articles tracked in this WikiProject. We can keep moving up the quality axis to see the number of articles in the Start-, C-, B-, GA-, and FA-classes and their distribution across importance levels.

Now let’s look focus on the horizontal importance axis, starting with “Top.” We can see that there is one B-class article in this category, three C-class, and seven Start-class articles—for a total of 11 assessed articles in the top-importance category. Moving to the right and following the same procedure, we can see that there are 24 high-importance, 48 mid-importance, and 91 low-importance articles—with the distribution across quality levels as shown in the grid.

Assessment grid for WikiProject Adoption, fostering, orphan care and displacement (“AFOD”), as of 26 February 2017. Click on the image to see the most up-to-date version of the grid in Wikipedia.

This statistical information comes together in two metrics, called WikiWork factors, that serve as a rough guide to the amount of work a given WikiProject entails. These metrics, ω and Ω (the lower- and upper-case versions of the Greek letter omega) are at the bottom of the AFOD assessment grid. The metric ω is the number of steps a WikiProject is from having all articles attain FA status; for example, an A-class article is one step away from that status, while a Stub-class article is six steps away. (List articles aren’t counted.) Multiplying the steps by the number of articles in that class and summing everything yields a ω of 986. The other metric, Ω, is a measure of relative workload: ω divided by the number of articles (again, excluding List articles).[1] It is always a number between zero and six—in this case, 4.91—with lower numbers indicating that less work is needed on average to bring an article to FA status.

Moving from the Assessment Grid to the Article Tables

The astute observer will notice that the numbers in the cells are blue, indicating a link to an active page in Wikipedia. Indeed, clicking on a number in the assessment grid to which this image links takes you to a further page that lists the article titles for the particular quality-importance pairing. (Clicking on the numbers also changes their colour, as it has done for two of the numbers in this image.) For example, clicking on the number “2” in the cell (FA, High) takes you to a table that shows the two articles that are considered “featured” (Wikipedia’s highest quality) and high-importance:

Table showing WikiProject AFOD articles rated as “High” importance and “Featured”—accessed via the (FA, High) cell in the AFOD assessment grid. Click on the image to see the most up-to-date version of the table in Wikipedia.

This table shows us that: (i) both articles were rated high-importance on 22 August 2009; (ii) the article “Attachment theory” became a featured article on 30 November 2009; and (iii) the article “Reactive attachment disorder” became a featured article on 18 June 2009. Clicking on the titles under the “Article” heading takes you to the current versions of the articles; clicking on the dates takes you to permanent links to the earlier versions, which, as a pink warning banner declares, “may differ significantly from the current revision.” The letters “t” and “h” are links to the Talk and History pages for the articles; the letter “l” and the heading “Score” relate to the eventual release of the article as part of the offline project, Wikipedia 1.0.

Putting it All Together: Using the Tools to Assign Articles for Editing

From the above, you can see how these tools—the assessment grid and article tables to which they lead—can be used to create a shortlist of existing Wikipedia articles for students to edit. In the AFOD assessment grid, for example, there are 62 articles rated as stub-class or start-class and considered to be top-, high- or mid-importance. This is a likely place to look for candidates for impact and improvement—though even the C- and B-class articles may also be good candidates if the aim is to achieve at least GA status. From this universe of candidates, instructors can generate a list of articles to which students can be reasonably expected to make a meaningful contribution, or from which students can choose their own articles to edit. For example, WikiProject Canadian law, of particular interest to me, has some 300 stub- or start-class articles of mid- to top-importance. The average workload, Ω, is 5.09. There is a lot of work to be done in Wikipedia—and I haven’t even begun to consider the task of writing new articles!

In a previous post, I wrote about how WikiProject Medicine acts as a forum for determining the priority (also called importance) of specific health-related Wikipedia articles and assessing their quality (also called class). More generally, these three concepts—WikiProjects, article importance, and article quality—are crucial for instructors and students to understand if they seek to use course-based assignments to improve Wikipedia. I will address each of them in turn.

WikiProjects

A WikiProject comprises a group of collaborators who aim to achieve specific Wikipedia editing goals, or to achieve goals in a specific subject or discipline represented in Wikipedia. An example of an editing type of project is WikiProject missing encyclopedic articles, which seeks to ensure that Wikipedia “has a corresponding article for every article in every other general purpose encyclopedia.” An example of a subject-specific type of project (in addition to WikiProject Medicine), is WikiProject Adoption, fostering, orphan care and displacement (“AFOD”). It aims to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of adoption, foster care, and child abandonment. A third type of project, one that combines both editing and subject goals, is exemplified by WikiProject Biography, which “concerns the creation, development, and organization of Wikipedia’s articles about persons.”

Wikipedia has a shortcut—sometimes more than one—for each project: “WP:” followed by an acronym. So, for example, entering WP:MISSING in Wikipedia’s search box takes you the Talk page for WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles; entering WP:AFOD takes you to the Talk page for WikiProject AFOD. Entering WP:WPBIO, WP:BIOG or WP:BIOGRAPHY takes you to the WikiProject Biography Talk page. There is even a project on WikiProjects—a meta-project, if you will—with the shortcut WP:PROJ.

A WikiProject Council tracks these projects, including activity levels and inter-project discussions. According to the most recent version of the Council’s WikiProject List, There are about 2,000 WikiProjects in English Wikipedia, with varying levels of activity and interest in articles. Indeed, a Wikipedia article will often be of interest to more than one WikiProject, and a key activity of participants is to identify the WikiProjects to which the article is of interest, along with the article’s importance and class, as assigned by those projects. This is done on the article’s Talk page. For example, the article on Barnardo’s, a British charity founded to care for vulnerable children and young people, is of interest to WikiProject AFOD, which ranks it as a high-importance, C-class article. But it is also of interest to WikiProject London, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the city of London; that project ranks it as mid-importance and start-class. (See accompanying excerpt.)

There are five levels of priority: top, high, mid, low, and NA (meaning “not an article”—that is, something other than an article, like a template or category). There is also a level for “unknown” or “needs assessing” that appears as ??? to the reader. Each WikiProject has its own criteria for these rankings. The table below shows the criteria in WikiProject Medicine, along with an example of a Wikipedia page for each ranking.

Subject is extremely important, even crucial, to medicine. Strong interest from non-professionals around the world. Usually a large subject with many associated sub-articles. Less than 1% of medicine-related articles achieve this rating.

Subject is clearly notable. Subject is interesting to, or directly affects, many average readers. This category includes the most common diseases and treatments as well as major areas of specialization. Fewer than 10% of medicine-related articles achieve this rating.

Normal priority for article improvement. A good article would be interesting or useful to many readers. Subject is notable within its particular specialty. This category includes most medical conditions, tests, approved drugs, medical subspecialties, well-known anatomy, and common signs and symptoms.

Article may only be included to cover a specific part of a more important article, or may be only loosely connected to medicine. Subject may be specific to one country or part of one country, such as licensing requirements or organizations. This category includes most of the following: very rare diseases, lesser-known medical signs, equipment, hospitals, individuals, historical information, publications, laws, investigational drugs, detailed genetic and physiological information, and obscure anatomical features.

There are nine quality levels or classes for the typical Wikipedia article: stub, start, C-class, B-class,GA (good article), A-class, FA (featured article), List, and FL (featured list). These categories are used by the Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team for deciding how close an article is to being distribution-quality (that is, to the goal of publishing Wikipedia articles in print, CD, DVD, or a combination thereof). Some WikiProjects also use intermediate classes, such as B+. A summary of the common classes is provided below. For more detailed criteria, see the Version 1.0 assessment page; for a categorized list of articles in each class, click on the name of the class in the leftmost column.

The article is either very short or a rough collection of information that needs much work. Stub-class articles are adequate enough to be accepted, but risk being dropped from article status altogether. The first step in improving a Stub-class article is usually the addition of referenced reasons that show why the topic is significant.

The article is developing but quite incomplete. Deficiencies may include inadequate citation to reliable sources or non-compliance with Wikipedia’s style guidelines. Raising the article to C-class typically requires further referencing, improvement in content and organization, and attention to grammar and writing style.

The article is substantial, but still lacks important content or contains irrelevant material. The article should have some references to reliable sources, but may still have significant problems or require substantial cleanup. By the time an article reaches C-class, it typically has at least some infoboxes, photographs, diagrams or other media.

The article is mostly complete and without major problems, but requires some further work to reach GA status. It is properly referenced to reliable sources, using inline citations. It is balanced, reasonably well written, and has a defined structure, including a lead section. Supporting materials, such as illustrations, diagrams and an infobox, should be included where relevant and useful. The article should not assume unnecessary technical background and should either avoid or explain technical terms where possible.

The article has attained good-article status (indicated at the top of the article by the “plus sign” logo) via an official review. In addition to being well written and following style guidelines, it is verifiable, contains no original research, and has no copyright violations or plagiarism. It represents viewpoints fairly, giving due weight to each, and focuses on the topic without going into unnecessary detail. It is typically illustrated with copyright-compliant images that are appropriately captioned. The article is stable in the sense of not being subject to edit wars or content disputes, though comparison with a featured article on a similar topic may show areas where content could be further developed.

The article is well organized and essentially complete, having been reviewed by impartial reviewers from a WikiProject or elsewhere. GA status is not a requirement for this level, but with further tweaking or peer review, it may also be appropriate for GA or FA status.

The article has attained featured article status (shown by the “star” logo at the top of the article) by passing an official review. It exemplifies the best work on Wikipedia and is distinguished by engaging and professional standards of writing, presentation and sourcing. A concise lead summarizes the topic and prepares the reader for the detail in subsequent sections that are hierarchically arranged and presented in a table of contents. Citation is extensive and consistent. The article has images and other media, where appropriate, with succinct captions and acceptable copyright status. FA-class articles may appear on Wikipedia’s home page, in a “Today’s featured article” section.

The article meets the criteria of a stand-alone list, which is an article that contains primarily a list, usually consisting of links to articles in a particular subject area. List articles are often alphabetized or chronologically ordered and may also be annotated.

The article has attained featured list status. It comprehensively covers the defined scope, usually providing a complete set of items and annotations that provide useful and appropriate information about those items.

In my next post, I will discuss how WikiProjects, article importance and article quality come together in a format that provides a convenient basis for selecting articles to edit for Wikipedia-based course assignments.